A Blast from your Pop-Music Past

One that I heard when young was Lonnie Donegan's Rock Island Line:


I liked it for its humour and strong beat. This is the record which started the skiffle boom. Donegan had been playing with Chris Barber's Jazz Band and playing a lot of American blues and folk. This was the start of his solo career.

Alan Lomax in his American Folk Songs of 1964 is scathing about this:

The Negro singer, Lead Belly, heard it, rearranged it in his own style, and made commercial phonograph recordings of it in the 1940s. One of these recordings was studied and imitated phrase by phrase, by a young English singer of American folk songs [referring to Lonnie Donegan], who subsequently recorded it for an English company. The record sold in the hundreds of thousands in the U.S. and England, and this Arkansas Negro convict song, as adapted by Lead Belly, was published as a personal copyright, words and music, by someone whose contact with the Rock Island Line was entirely through the grooves of a phonograph record.

Click to expand...

When you listen to the Lead Belly version, you can see what he means


However, this imitation is typical of the British folk and skiffle scene where many of the recordings in the 60's and 70's were imitations of field recordings. It's only when the tradition developed that it found its own voice - much as Lead Belly did when he adapted the original song.

PS - it's incredible how young Donegan looks on this record.